"I now have a what looks like a standard Gnome 2 desktop I'm using 12.04 it took about 2 minutes to install no playing with so for the life of 12.04 (long term release) you can have the Gnome 2 desktop if you want it."

You deserve major props for trying this!

I couldn't get it to work way back when this whole switch happened and I ended up installing Mint instead. It's good to know that gnome 2 works today.
Let me ask you, can you switch between Gnome 2 and your other desktops without any issues? If so, I really wonder why Canonical chose to face the criticism instead of simply giving in to users who wanted a gnome 2 option.

I see no reason to run Gnome 2 over Mate or Cinnamon today, but I'm very impressed that you've given it a go! That kind of investigative work deserves a reward, but you'll have to settle for a complement.

I don't think Fallback is Gnome 2 it looks and works like Gnome 2 but is:

The GNOME Fallback interface (which is a GNOME 3 interface that looks like classic GNOME 2) is provided by the GNOME Classic and GNOME Classic (no effects) session types. The overarching desktop environment is GNOME 3. The window manager is metacity. Install this with the gnome-session-fallback package

I thought you were referring to a real gnome 2, I must have missed that somehow in the context of the discussion. Well that's too bad.

I vaguely remember trying the gnome 3 "fallback" desktop, I think it lacked alot of support for customisable widgets and panels. It was a theme to make gnome 3 look more like gnome 2, but that's about it.